This Heat

It’s the earliest hot it has ever been here in New York, truly diabolical in its discomfort, especially the sun. She means business. Last summer was really bad, this one seems to be headed in the same direction, except after these sultry days, the temperature will drop to from 95° to the 60s.¹ Our new apartment is on the third floor with incredible light and air, but we haven’t put in the air-conditioning, so I’m at a local bar where both the bartender and I both have a quietly-baked slowness about us. This isn’t my first third floor living, there were two residences in Chicago, a city that can get very hot and humid. An old warehouse on Lake Street whose north-facing windows are even with the Green Line, we’d make eye contact with commuters heading home from downtown to Oak Park, the second a classic Chicago apartment with tiny bedrooms off the main rooms, windows so thin to the wind we’d staple up thick plastic and blow dry it tight for warmth in the winter.

I moved to Chicago in the summer of 1995, during a vicious heat wave that claimed over 700 lives. People slept on the beaches of Lake Michigan seeking respite, and ice cream trucks were used as temporary morgues. I wasn’t there for the worst of it, but when we moved into our apartment on the north side, I noticed how the old folks’ homes and other high rises didn’t all have AC units, some windows did, and some of those were delusional gestures of relief, which meant every other window without was a very hot apartment. This heat wave was the impetus for the creation of cooling centers by the city, places for people to gather where they could be safe, cool, and not have to spend money.

We never had AC on the farm, we just used fans to pull the cross breezes, and at Uncle Kenny’s house we just had a bathtub to bathe in, no shower, you could only fill the tub to be two inches high lest the well run dry. My mom’s house had central air, she’d holler at us “you weren’t raised in a barn, shut the door!” and “I’m not paying to cool (or heat, depending on season) the whole neighborhood!” Statements I file under classic mom things to say, along with “maybe some day I’ll leave and never come back,” opposed to dad things to say, like “I’ll give you something to cry about.”

I never had AC in Chicago, none of us did. What’s the point if you live in a big old warehouse? Most of the bars and venues had the kind in the transom over the door that dripped condensation more than cooled, yet they were still our saviors. Some nights, after a show in some sweaty place, we’d meet at the Oak Street beach downtown, strip down to our underwear, a jump in the lake, get dressed and go home. We were good at being uncomfortable. There was no money for air-conditioning, it was never on the table.

The first summer I lived in Brooklyn I didn’t have that kind of bill money either. That was a very hot summer, with no relief except the local bar I’d take my dog to after service. The bartender was sweet on me, and her, this was right after the smoking ban when bars in Brooklyn would put out plastic cups of water as ashtrays, certain the city wasn’t coming through to ticket. My sister Maggi, horrified and supportive, sent me money to buy an AC unit and my roommate and I went to PC Richards in Astoria, our first excursion into translating space into square feet to buy the right size, and our first time in any kind of store like that. Most of my adult life up until that moment was spent with thrifted and streeted items and hand-me-downs. Buying something this expensive and new was nerve-racking, it still is. We lived above the restaurant, a railroad with little air to encourage, along with our two dogs and a cat. Our freezer was full of dampened sheets to remake our beds before sleeping.²

I carried that unit up the stairs, no patience for assistance. I wanted to get it into the window in time to experience some luxury on my day off, sitting in my rocking chair, watching TV, and drinking beer in the air-conditioning. The television was my nana’s old Sears TV, wood-paneled on the sides with a turn dial I managed to adapt (and adapt and adapt) to whatever DVD player I had and whatever antennae would make free network television a reality.³

My youthful ignorance tossed the AC in the window, believing the weight of the top window pane would be sufficient to keep it in place. And it did, for years after I followed suit, if I even bothered to take the unit out. I’d shove old t-shirts and socks underneath and on the sides for insulation, a few scraps of 2x4 underneath to level it out so it wouldn’t fall on unsuspecting neighbors on the sidewalk.⁴

Then one summer, I lost that willful stupidity, it left my body and mind. There was no specific event, although it was after the summer after Hurricane Sandy because I asked Pastor Ann, whom I met at Greenpoint Reformed Church where she established a weekly meal and food pantry. I did prepare for that storm, meaning I filled the bathtub with water, and bought some food, a bottle of bourbon, a few tall religious candles, and a two gallons of water.

I wonder where the previous version of me went, if it’s just the passage of time or the years of one failure after another, personally and professionally, if you can call anything I did the to be truly personal or professional. I wasn’t a coddled immature dumbass, but something left me, something wild, a part of me that grasped at straws as I headed towards turning forty, and maybe that’s for the best. That compass had been broken for some time, taking me on wrong turns. I finally knew that air-conditioner could fall out of the window.

One Friday night in Chicago, maybe 1999, the transformer went out on the west side, taking with it both traffic and street lights. All the hydrants were open, the streets chaos. This was my second third floor domicile, moved into after being evicted from the warehouse by the Chicago Fire Department for safety reasons. It was too hot, the brick of the building storing all the prior days’ temperatures. My roommate Geoff and I were spent, lights felt too hot, so I lit a candle, opened a can of Black Label, and played the first Godspeed You Black Emperor album, the slow, slightly apocalyptic weirdness and Morricone-ness desert feelings a perfect soundtrack.

Hit Play.

(I just recorded the first side of the album, the very same LP, here. I don’t want to pay for an app to embed it. Have you heard it? Do you listen to full albums?)

When I left for work the other day, sweaty and stressed out (did I pack the right tools for this job? do I smell, is it the shirt, or the moment?) I told Vince to “order whatever air-conditioners you want.” And he did, complete with the safety bars. This time, we both carried it up the stairs (I respect you, vertebrae!), but since the temperature dropped, we haven’t put them in, still milking the open windows for all they have to offer. I’m not romanticizing summers of yore that were less hot than now and the literal hell where we are headed, but I hope we always have a lake (questionable) to jump into and maybe the ability to pay high energy bills for a few months (most definitely questionable). Hopefully we’ll always have some respite from this heat, like the time the cows busted through the electric fence and headed to the creek in the woods. It took us all afternoon to find them, they were the most unbothered creatures when we did, just sitting in the shade, chewing their cud. We have solid soundtracks for slow hot nights at our fingertips, and I like to think I’ll never know if the soft serve truck has ever moonlit as a morgue. But let’s be honest, we are in the United States of America. Mr. Softie definitely has a second job.

1. Right now it’s cold and rainy on this holiday weekend, the first mark of summer weeks before the solstice. I love a rainy holiday, disappointing barbeque-ers and beachgoers, people who revel in the nice days and nights while I listen to Mahalia Jackson watching the grey sky. I’d probably be doing the same if the sky were blue. In the words of legendary record label, kranky, “let a frown be your umbrella.”

2. I also like to do this with a robe, the important thing is to dampen, not get really wet. Other heat tips: get kitchen towels wet (this time it’s ok), squeeze out the water, and put in the freezer, stretched out, not bunched up, then put it on the back of your neck. Also, run cool water on the inside of your wrists to cool down. These last two are old line cook tips. Go to the movies. That’s a classic.

3. That workhorse also lived in the warehouse, I carried it up the terrifying ladder to the roof to watch Revenge of the Nerds for another hot night when we slept on the roof. I took it downstairs to the restaurant so we could watch the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, and as I think of all the heavy ass TVs and AC units I’ve lugged around, along with everything else, I understand my L6-S1 vertebrae are compromised.

4. I always marvel at the ingenuity of my neighbors with their units, the ones up in December gift-wrapped as holiday decorations, some with cans of beans shimming them level. It’s an art.